As promised, a third anti-RCP installment. This time a blast from the past.

Well, John Riley and I had intended to do at least three installments in our anti-RCP series but events intervened, particularly on my end, and the third piece never got posted. I am hearing these days that most of the RCP wackos have left town now. Hopefully that's true.

I remember back in 2000 in LA for the DNC, when I first had the misfortune of running into these hacks, just what a joke the "flag on a flag" flag was that they waved around incessantly. For those who haven't seen it, I tried to find a picture online but the closest I could come was the image below (the flag on a banner, I suppose). Just picture it being waved around on a flag.

Lately I've been seeing these printed stencil on a poster images of RCP cult leader Bob Avakian floating around here and there. These aren't actual stencils, of course, printed on glossy paper such as they are. But they are printed to look like stencils, as if they have street cred. But in fact they rolled off some printing press somewhere. I think in many ways those posters and the "flag on a flag" really sums up the RCP. Something disconnected. A facsimile. And endlessly self-referential, for sure.

The flag on a banner! Attached to a bayonet so you know
it's all militant and shit! Watch out! They may cut you!

Just read their newspaper. I checked out their account of the May 29th immigrant march. You can't make this shit up:

At the same time, the agitation that this system can't solve the problems of humanity but the revolution CAN, was captivating for many others. Some people took up the chant started by the communists, "No tenemos que vivir así. Otro mundo es posible" ("We don't have to live this way. Another world is possible"), especially when the anti-immigrant reactionaries came out. And those who were more revolutionary-minded were drawn to the banner that said, "No hay un problema de inmigración, sí hay un problema del capitalismo, la revolución es la solución" ("There is no immigration problem, there is a capitalism problem, revolution is the solution") and the Message and Call from the RCP, USA: "The Revolution We Need… The Leadership We Have." Several college students spoke to the great disparities in the world and how resources exist which could meet the needs of the people, but are instead being used for profit while masses of people are forced to try to find ways to survive. After the rally, several people who were seriously looking for a way out of all this got together to watch Bob Avakian's talk, Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, and stayed up talking into the night about historic questions of changing the world. (emphasis mine)

I mean, seriously? If you hadn't seen their pathetic little cadre with your own eyes you'd almost believe the people were rallying behind the RCP's bold representation of a flag on a flag. Fortunately, they were not. You'll note the unbearably long paragraphs (and revolutionary enthusiasm!) of the RCP writer -- a hallmark that derives from emulation of their leader, known for his endless, record-breaking even, sentences. What Castro is to the speech, Avakian is to the sentence. Consider this bit I took from a randomly selected article:

To briefly summarize this, the point is that you can conceive of the political structures and the way that they relate to the larger society in the U.S. as something of a pyramid: at the top you have the ruling class forces, which, speaking in broad strokes and for general purposes, are divided on the one hand into the Republican Party and on the other hand the Democratic Party, and what these parties represent in terms of "conservatism" and "liberalism" (about which I'll have more to say a little bit later); and then, continuing the metaphor of the pyramid, you have lines extending (or angling) from the top of the pyramid, where the ruling class sits with its two basic wings, down to the social bases that these different wings of the bourgeoisie at the top of the pyramid seek to appeal to—on the one side the "right," and on the other side the "left," in the terms that are utilized commonly in the framework of bourgeois politics. (emphasis mine)

I've been known to use a semi-colon in my day, but reading Avakian reminds me more than ever of the importance of Kurt Vonnegut's legendary caution against semi-colons: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." Please, Bob, break that shit up!

Anyhow, the response from our series has been very good, with people noting articles and analysis on the RCP that we had forgotten over the years or that we neglected to link to for one reason or another. One comrade out there reminded us of the wonderful essay, "The World Can't Wake", a blistering attack on the RCP's front group during their anti-war organizing phase, World Can't Wait. I remember enjoying that piece when it came out. There's also "What you should know about the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)" hosted at Infoshop, which has a lot of links and a recommended reading list that includes Daniel Cohn-Bendit's "Obsolete Communism" -- definitely a good read on the topic of authoritarian communists (even if Cohn-Bendit has disappointed us all more than a bit since May 1968).

But my favorite submission of all came from our abiding comrade in Tucson, Dan Todd, who sent along a poster he and John Zerzan distributed some years ago in the Bay, under their Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous monicker. Folks will remember Dan from his presentation at Beer & Revolution last January.

Perhaps there are others out there who have a copy of his collection of posters, "Cold Fury: Advertisements for Anarchy 1982-2010". Those who do will recognize the trademark Situationist-influenced style. Not included in his collection, I seem to remember it appearing in Zerzan's "Elements of Refusal", if memory serves, the RCP gets a mention, although it isn't the focus of the piece. However, the points made are universal and inform just how long the backward RCP has been mucking around the left, lurking and attaching itself like a lamprey to genuine peoples movements everywhere.

Anyhow, as (perhaps) the last in our series on the Revolutionary Communist Party, and as a prelude to a fond farewell (soon, I hope), I present it below.


Enjoy!

Swinging from the Tyburn Tree: the violent creation of the working class and the resistance it spawned.

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's fantastic book, "The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic" is one of my favorite books of all time. That book, when combined with Linebaugh's excellent "The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century", offer two first-class and complimentary views on the violent imposition of capitalism on the English population and the rest of the then emerging colonial world. Naturally, people resisted this reorganization in all manner of ways.

Linebaugh's book in particular offers the reader not just a view of life before capitalism, but it also reveals the bloody battle that took place over the imposition of capitalist relations, centering on the hangings at the Tyburn gallows. On these gallows those poor in London, dispossessed of their commons and resisting or locked out of the new capitalist work regime, faced the grim, bloody justice of emerging capitalism, determined as it was to bring the English poor to heel before the new mode one way or another. Performed in public, before large crowds and en masse, the hangings amounted to mass state terrorism on the population. A warning of the most extreme kind: conform or die.

Itself often a point of violent contention, with mobs known to riot and rescue the judged from time to time, the hangings routinely involved those charged with stealing food and other minor offenses. The commodity form was just emerging and it was to be respected! This in an era of the mass dislocation of the enclosures gives a hint of the grand scale of the terror. Those lucky enough to escape the hanging tree suffered transportation to Europe's "New World" in bondage under harsh terms of indentured servitude. Thus it is from the resisting English working class, initially, that the colonial State got much of its settler masses.

In the "Many-Headed Hydra" Linebaugh and Rediker take time to point out as well, using the coastal Atlantic's sea-going working class as the example, the effects of the likewise emerging system of white supremacy. Sailors, a motley multi-racial bunch, routinely defied the new racial regulations of the day, bringing a working class wreck across racial lines to colonial society's elites, rioting and resisting their way from port to port. At the same time, these heterogeneous working class formations' contentions with colonial capitalism's racial forms and privileges also spurred the State to further regiment and formalize them. And as the settler State increasingly turned to chattel slavery kidnapped from Africa, the threat that faced the ruling English white elite in colonial America was always a tri-racial alliance of the emerging white working class, African slaves and indigenous tribes. It was this burning fuse that whiteness was constructed to douse. And it is this division that lives with us to this day.

Thinking of these early rebels from the capitalist and racialized order is important, because it shows us not only an alternate history, but it also a hint of what we had and how we lost it. Relationships which perhaps seem normal enough to us now, like work or policing, seem quite the opposite when we look back and realize the sheer violence that the State was willing to use to impose and defend what were then new and generally unwelcome institutions for the extraction of profit and the preservation of power and privilege.

Returning now to the sailors, there was one particular kind of sailor that terrorized the elite like no other. For hundreds of years, but peaking perhaps in the early 18th century, pirates stirred the fearful imaginations of blue-blooded American aristocrats like none other save perhaps the slave insurrections of the South. Indeed, when the Amistad ship, famous for its mutiny and flight out of bondage, first appeared on the North Carolina horizon it was described in no uncertain terms as a pirate ship. The comparison was apt, not least of all because of the infamously defiant multi-racial characteristics of the sailor class and, in particular, the pirate hordes that plagued corporate shipping.

Pirates themselves defied not just the racial regulations of their time, but also the system of work under capitalism. Seizing and plundering, electing their own leaders, dividing up the loot in egalitarian ways and living in the moment all defined the pirate existence on the open sea. This stood in sharp contrast to a system increasingly regulated by the clock and the turning of gears inside the dank, repressive factory. Naturally, aside from the general miserable conditions of life under capitalism, the prime recruiter for the pirate population was in fact the specific nature of life as a sailor. Life on a navy ship or merchant vessel was factory-like to the extreme. Many sailors served against their will and for little or no pay. It's easy to see how in these conditions questions of race and division can quickly fade away.

It's interesting to note that on the slave ships that navigated the Middle Passage with their stolen cargo, it wasn't uncommon for nets to stretch out from the ship out over the sea for some distance beyond the deck. Captured slaves it seems, would not infrequently attempt suicide by jumping into the sea when they had the opportunity, denying in essence the capitalist the value of their captured labor. In contemporary times, I'm reminded of the nets deployed around the FoxConn factories in China, meant to contain and nullify the wave of suicides afflicting the company and its workforce. Before the nets, many of those attempting self-liberation from Capital's undead grip took flight from the FoxConn factory roof itself, ending up a bloody mash on the sidewalk below. Capitalism lets nothing go without a fight, not even your own body.

So, its in this spirit that I post below two links to recent Marcus Rediker lectures both on piracy. The first, titled, "Black Pirates: The Curious Early History of the Amistad Rebellion" focuses on the framework of piracy as a way of looking at the Amistad rebellion. The second, "The Real Pirates Of the Caribbean", was given in 2007 at the 2007 Bristol Radical History Week in the UK and goes over some of the history he uncovered while writing his book, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age". Check them out. They're both well worth your time.





Watch "The Real Pirates Of the Caribbean" at the Bristol Radical History Group's webpage. Note that Rediker's lecture begins at the Tyburn tree. Many pirates likewise met their end there.

An Urgent Request from Grace Daniels

Below my comments here I have re-posted a letter appealing for assistance in Grace Daniel's case. Please do everything you can to offer aid and comfort as requested. Your help is needed now more now than ever.

PCWC stands unequivocally behind everyone beaten and arrested by those thugs the Phoenix Police and MCSO at the January 16th anti-Arpaio march. We likewise denounce the leftist activists who collaborated in advance and after the fact with the attack and the bullshit press that, in the truest tribute to the Red Scare I've seen in some time, quickly tried and convicted our friends without bothering getting the facts.

One reason anarchists oppose law and policing is precisely because it focuses on process over substance, power over equality and the result therefore almost always resembles nothing even remotely like even a shadow of what we might call justice as most people understand the word. More often than not the outcome looks something akin to blackmail or, as Orwell put it in a slightly different context, a boot to the face. That the State is incapable of delivering justice in most cases -- for instance when factors like race, income or oppositional politics come into play -- reveals the entire spectacle to be a sham.

Often, when the cards are stacked against you as is the case with the majority of us that lack wealth and power, you are forced into a lose-lose situation, where the choice becomes more one of damage control and the hedging of bets in order to preserve your already limited freedom. Deeper questions of justice and wrong and right frustratingly fade into the background.

Frustratingly, I say, because despite the sheer absurdity of the process when taken at face value, at every turn the so-called justice system reminds you with the grand language of guilt and innocence, justice and reparation, that although what you're going through feels a lot like extortion, instead it is supposedly a quest for truth and fact. Bullshit! Cognitive dissonance prevails nowhere in this society so much as in the courtroom. And since the State is built on laws, it is in the courtroom where we often get our purest look at its hypocrisies, as well as its failings.

Consider, as a case in point, Grace's situation where two sentences, one a month and the other more than ten years are bandied about as equally viable options for the same alleged crime. Where does justice lie when the outcomes, both State-sanctioned, are so disparate? To speak of justice as long as these kinds of dichotomies exist is in reality to speak of nothing at all.

Realistically, going to trial can be very dangerous given the tendency of the agents of the State and their masters to lie, cheat and manufacture/disappear evidence/witnesses. It takes strength and courage to stand up against that onslaught, even if the struggle isn't carried through to trial. As anarchists we reject the State's definitions of guilt or innocence and we stand with our comrades under attack, even as we understand the limitations that the legal framework puts on defense and the sad pragmatism that often must result from the pathetic application of the stinking law.

For my part, I do not begrudge anyone, with the obvious exception of those whose deals lead to collaboration with the State, for taking the better of two shitty deals, or of not risking a fight that can have catastrophic results. Battling the State on their home turf is not easy and in the courtroom they hold all the cards. I myself have faced this situation more than once in my life. My deepest sympathies to anyone who sits in a similar position. Decisions rarely come easy.

Justice in capitalist democracy is a sham and I would no more hold a comrade to its anemic standards than I would myself. It's failings reveal only more clearly the need for an uncompromising revolution that overturns this wretched order: a kicking over of this justice death-machine that has left so many wrecked lives in its wake. Solidarity in struggle to all who face it in the name of liberty, freedom and equality for themselves and others, as well as to those who face it just to pay the rent or put food on the table.

Support our comrades under attack. Support Grace Daniels.

-Phoenix Insurgent

An Urgent Request from Grace Daniels

Friends, Family, Comrades:

I just spoke to my lawyer regarding the current state of proceedings regarding the charges being alleged against me since my arrest on January 16th at the Anti-Arpaio march in Phoenix, Arizona. I had hoped my next post on this topic would at least contain semi-positive news; unfortunately that is not the case. The prosecutor has disclosed their final plea deal which would require me to plead guilty to a class 5 felony, with a mandatory 30 days in jail, and a minimum of 1 year supervised probation (which could be up to 3 years).

I have until Wednesday to agree to take this plea or not, if I decide to go forward with the plea it would be effective on September 3rd, Friday. If I decide to take this to trial, the date is set for September 14th. Given the case that we have I normally would see taking this to trial as the best option, however, because a special sentencing statute specifying that this was a “dangerous” offense was added, the judge has no leeway in my sentencing and if convicted it would mean a mandatory 10.5 years in prison. As of right now although we have witnesses, we do not have any video documentation showing the moment that the alleged “crime” was committed. The police as anyone who was there knows, and as we know through the video that we have seen, had numerous cameras throughout the protest and at that moment. However, they are claiming that it does not exist at this point, meaning that it has likely been destroyed.

I am writing this as a last urgent call out to whoever reads this. Things that may help if received by Wednesday would be; character letters (guidelines specified below, you can email them to me at s0917daniels@gmail.com), any video documentation of the protest, and witnesses who saw me directly before, during, and after my arrest. If you feel you have any possible information or documentation that may help in this case, please email me for my lawyers phone number.

Thank you to everyone who has provided unending support and to those who continue to fight despite tactics such as these used to try to scare us into submission.

If you are unfamiliar with the events on the 16th, please see links below for more background and current updates in regards to the other 4 who were arrested that day.

~Grace

GUIDELINES

Who they are - brief

How they know you, how long, etc

Acknowledge that they know essentially what you are charged with

Then, FOCUS on your good character traits, with specific examples if possible.

Character for non-violence generally, and if they have experience with you at marches, rallies, etc, your non-violence at those.

They can then simply request leniency on your behalf.

They should NOT profess your innocence unless they were there and saw you right before and up to your arrest – and of course, we have found no such person yet.

They should NOT try to school the prosecutors and/or judge on the justice system, jail, prison, etc.

The latter stuff just turns off the professional who is reading it and they will ignore the good stuff!

The focus is on you, not the case.

New PCWC Poster: Boycott Rosita's - No Love for Rightwing Tacos!

Our new PCWC poster "Boycott Rosita's: No Love for Rightwing Tacos" is finished and ready to be posted around town! It recently came to our attention that the Rosita's location in Tempe had quietly been the hub for rightwing and anti-immigrant organizing in Tempe, this included hosting Tea Party groups and a Sheriff Arpaio speaking engagement. The owners at Rosita's took their anti-immigrant and anti-worker activities a step further by firing a longtime employee in retaliation for posting about the Tea Party events on an anti-Arpaio facebook page. This news was all the more disturbing because we have been patrons there for years, all the tacos, burritos, and beers we'd bought were lining the pockets of a rightwing Mexican restaurant. We'd been funding our enemies!

In early July we were tipped off that Sheriff Arpaio was in Tempe speaking to supporters at Rosita's, so we made some calls, got a few friends together, and booked it over to crash the party. We missed that old bastard Arpaio by just a few minutes, but there was still a few dozen Tea Party people in the main dining room where the walls were adorned with a number of Republican "Tea Party" candidates' campaign signs. We were given the boot pretty quickly by management, who insisted they have the right to host Arpaio, the Tea Party, and whoever they want, regardless of how uncomfortable or fearful it makes the customers or employees.

One worker wasn't having it, so he went to the facebook group "People against Sheriff Joe Arpaio" and posted a call out for people to come down to Rosita's to confront the anti-immigrant gathering.

A disclaimer: We did not learn of this event from this employee, in fact a friend was eating lunch at Rosita's and saw Arpaio arrive and speak, it was this person who hit us up to tell us this was going down. I want to address this because the employee who wrote the post on facebook was fired a couple of days later, and that if the worker was fired because of our appearance at the restaurant it was not because of the post on facebook, because we hadn't seen it.

I've since met the worker, he told me that when he came to work a couple of days after the Arpaio-Tea Party event that his manager was waiting for him with a printed copy of the facebook page in hand. It struck me as bizarre that his boss would think to take a look at the anti-Arpaio facebook group for some evidence behind our interruption earlier that week, as this is a page that is monitored by Arpaio's security detail, and possibly other law enforcement agencies, it's not unlikely that the management was in collusion with MCSO. While this information could have been provided to Rosita's by one of Arpaio's goons, it also could've been a customer who saw the post and called it in, or some rightwinger keeping an eye on the anti-Arpaio site who reported it to the management.

This isn't the first incident in recent months of workers being fired in retaliation for standing in solidarity with immigrants, or taking action against rightwing anti-immigrant groups . In June I wrote in support of the 13 Latino Pei Wei workers who were denied a day off to attend the large immigrant demonstration back in May, these workers defied the company's orders by taking a wild cat strike to join the thousands of other people at the march. Like the Pei Wei workers, the Rosita's worker took action by blowing the whistle on the rightwing organizing going down in the restaurant, but unlike the Pei Wei workers this came from a white worker who took the initiative to go public on Rosita's love affair with the authorities and the racists from the right.

For all of the efforts of media outlets, politicians, and anti-immigrant activists who continue to exacerbate tensions between white workers and workers of color, these incidents show that while action by workers is isolated, there is an undercurrent of class solidarity that could grow to push the debate on SB 1070 in a liberatory direction. Along these lines, it may be surprising to workers who fight back to find that, whether brown or white, the capitalist has a pink slip waiting for those fighting against the white supremacist order by fighting for their dignity, or for those who defy their perceived elevated status on the class/race hierarchy to stand with workers struggling below them. This is the fragile truce between white workers and the capitalist class, a system that rewards white people with a series of privileges in return for their loyalty to the system of private property and profit that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of our counterparts from communities of color.

The disciplining of workers who challenge the white supremacist order and the collaboration between the owners and the rightwing and anti-immigrant groups cannot stand, we ought to discipline the bosses who find it acceptable to bring this level of terror into the workplace and community. In this "right to work" state an employee can be fired with or without cause, so taking walk outs, strikes, or other forms of collective action almost certainly guarantee getting laid off.

We are calling for a permanent boycott of the two Rosita's restaurants in the valley, not with the intention of harming the workers, the owners of this restaurant do that enough by hosting the enemies of working people. We want to drag these cheer leaders of repression into the light, to shame them publicly, and to withdraw any monetary support for them since they've used so much of our money spent there to attack immigrants and communities of color, this is unacceptable. In these times it's important to "out" businesses that provide shelter or a space for anti-immigrant, rightwing, racist, and/or fascist groups.

General Plutarco Calles, Dec 1924

Perhaps the owners of Rosita's (Rosa's son and his wife) would do well to look at a little history, it could be easy for them too, they wouldn't have to start any further than their own restaurant's menu. Rosa Keeme, the founder of Rosita's, would probably have never made it to Tempe or opened a restaurant fifty years ago if her family had to contend with the border, movement, and immigration controls that Mexicans face these days. Rosa's mother, Maria Jesus Calles-Moreno, benefited significantly from the lack of border controls, in fact it may have saved her life.

If the biography on the menu is to be believed, Rosa's great uncle was Plutarco Elías Calles, a Mexican general, politician, and later a president and dictator-like figure who founded the group which later became the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the corrupt and brutal political body that ruled Mexico for seventy years. Plutarco ruled formally as president for awhile and then informally after that through his political machine until he was finally forced into a short exile in the United States. So, the Calles family, like many Mexican families during this era, was forced to flee to Sonora, Mexico to escape political repression. Over the years, the family moved back and forth from Sonora to Arizona, to Sonora, and back again, not all together any different than thousands of other Mexican workers who had to travel to the U.S. and back for decades doing seasonal work, or the millions of families that NAFTA uprooted and divided with the border wall.

We can't change capitalism, it has to be abolished, so we won't pretend that even if the owners of Rosita's came to their senses and put a stop to their cooperation with the anti-immigrant groups, that their restaurant, or virtually any other workplace, will be a workers' paradise. At the end of the day it's still an underpaid, overworked, misery inducing job, but I'll be damned if we let those who seek to actively lower our material conditions have an open place from which to propagandize and organize to keep us all down.

Shutdown racist, anti-immigrant, and rightwing organizing in Tempe, boycotting Rosita's is just the start!

Photo of the day

"Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."
-Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno, Nigeria

Vandalized BP service station in NYC.

Despite the massive PR campaign coming from the bastards at British Petroleum, it's reassuring that some people have long memories (see above photo). It's not as though BP suffered a severe enough economic backlash from the destruction they unleashed on the Gulf either when service stations reported only a 5% drop in sales across the board. Perhaps the BP spill was just little too close to home for business as usual to go on, BP reported a $15 billion dollar loss in the second quarter due to the costs of managing the spill, a large scale ecological collapse for the region.

Europe's second largest oil corporation has little to fear in the long run, just check out the track record of Exxon Mobil or Shell, 40 years of oil spills and systematic destruction of the earth and human communities in the Nigerian Delta has had little effect on long term profits or public perception, due to their massive PR operations and the general lack of action from the west over just about any atrocity in Africa. Despite all of their baggage, 2nd quarter 2010 profits from Shell were $4.5 billion dollars, Exxon Mobil pulled in $7.56 billion, both companies are party to the continued repression of the resistance to their operations in the Niger Delta.

If the Nigerian model is any sign of what's to come, the impunity of oil companies will continue to varying degrees whether in the Delta, the Gulf, or perhaps even the Mediterranean soon enough. So don't hold your breath for any of these oil companies to be reigned in by any state actor anytime soon either, the demands for profit and the explosion of the eco-crisis have gone hand in hand for decades now with little consequence for those in power. Without the intervention of a popular and effective direct action movement aimed at destroying the worldwide menace of industrial capitalism, we will no doubt continue to see this disaster spread to every corner of the earth until the bitter end.

Freedom of movement is no joke: The Daily Show catches on to the contradictions of every day white supremacy in Arizona

Bravo to the Daily Show! Aside from the pass given to the pro-camera group, the Daily Show does a great job of highlighting one of the most glaring contradictions at work in the right-libertarian/constitutionalist milieu here in Arizona. For sometime now, PCWC has taken aim at the tension between white peoples' demands for free movement, with the expectation of increased policing for immigrants, coupled with the militarization of the border.

The Daily Show reporter Olivia Munn gets it right, demonstrating that the anti-camera movement's reactionary call for "cops, not cameras" is essentially a back door to a racist argument that says "free movement for whites, increased policing for everyone else". This position was probably best served up by the Tempe "Santas Against 1984" who disabled the traffic cameras a few years back and delivered a solid message against all controls on movement. Their youtube video went viral back in 2008, and takes Munn's send-up of the anti-immigrant/anti-camera tendency a step further by attacking both the cameras, and those who would control movement with borders.

The two videos are posted below, enjoy!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Arizona's Photo Radar
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes

The "Revolution" we really, really DON'T Need...

A constant for those of us in Arizona who have been in the streets since the passage of SB 1070, has been the troubling presence of political opportunists, or "the hacks" as we're now accustomed to calling them. A "31 Flavors" of Left-wing political groups, most of them looking to jump on the anti-SB 1070 band wagon as a means to get their name out there, recruit new members, and/or using the human rights disaster we face to raise funds to build their presence.

For months now, the Trotskyist sect, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), have shown up at pro-immigrant/anti-Arpaio demonstrations hawking their paper, "The Militant," and setting up a table to sell their books. Meanwhile, the ANSWER "coalition" has appeared overnight and called for a demonstration the day before the law goes into effect. As it's been documented over the years, ANSWER is a front for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Leninist group that broke away from the Stalinist line of the Workers World Party a few years back. From where we stand, these groups, who parachute in with their own agenda, offer no answer from any of their party building, paper selling militants, or disingenuous front organizations for the crisis in Arizona.

With the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), there are plenty of opportunities for a well meaning person to get caught up in their web of front groups. Whether you're looking to fight police brutality, stop the U.S. military occupations abroad, free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, or (perhaps their most bizarre attempt at recruiting through fronts) join the international supporters of the murderous Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, the RCP has it covered. The last time the RCP poked around the valley it was during the heyday of the anti-war movement and the birth of the immigrant rights movement, and they didn't stick around for long. A small group would attend demonstrations, in their World Can't Wait attire at anti-war marches, and as the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade at an immigrant rally, but were told off each time they surfaced by valley anarchists. As they were unable to intervene, or uninterested in the political situation in Phoenix four years ago, the RCP has returned to the valley, sans front group...sort of.

Paying homage to the 1964 Mississippi civil rights campaign, groups from across the state have called for a Freedom Summer in Arizona, a campaign of activism and awareness, most prominently reflected in the campaign organized by No More Deaths and Tierra Y Libertad down in Tucson. The Freedom Summer name has also been put into use by the aforementioned Workers World Party's Stalinist youth group "F.I.S.T.," who are calling for more of the same, a united front to combat the far right-wing, while their Maoist competitors at the RCP have their own ideas on what this summer should look like.

The RCP's "Arizona Freedom Summer" is a particularly unique brand of left intervention, because unlike the other Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist tendencies, the RCP's activists are building their organizing around one objective, promotion of their leader, Chairman Bob Avakian. In the call for "Arizona Freedom Summer" the authors(s) state:

Arizona Freedom Summer is about radically changing this whole dynamic, defying this whole direction, and setting new terms. "The days when this system can just keep on doing what it does to people, here and all over the world… when people are not inspired and organized to stand up against these outrages and to build up the strength to put an end to this madness… those days must be GONE. And they CAN be." (from "The Revolution We Need… The Leadership We Have," A Message and A Call from the RCP, USA)

Their "Freedom Summer" project is being treated as another opportunity to roll out the latest mass line from Avakian, this being one of two paragraphs in the article that outlines the type of organizing the RCP wants to bring to the table, the other is once again an opportunity to promote Avakian as the leadership the RCP thinks we all need. A selection from the second paragraph (below) embeds more of the Avakian worship within their otherwise banal political rhetoric:

There needs to be a broad and defiant resistance that refuses to comply with this law, and there need to be many thousands of people in the course of building this resistance finding out about the revolution we need and the leadership we have, coming to see that it is this system and the rulers of this country that are totally illegitimate and that another world is possible. (Emphasis added)

Let's not forget their fundraising either, one of the RCP organizers, who has moved into town, let it be known that they are planning on printing up one million copies of their new poster. What poster could be so important that they need one million copies? It's the latest bilingual statement from Avakian "The Revolution We Need...The Leadership We Have." Unbelievable. The grassroots groups on the ground have very little money, as in virtually none. We have comrades who are struggling to stay out of the clutches of the state, neighborhood projects that are entirely self-funded, community spaces for youth and indigenous people that struggle to keep the lights on, and indigenous initiatives against the border and destruction of traditional lands here in occupied O'odham land. It's outrageous that they can spend tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars on their latest piece of propaganda, while the projects I've listed, and many more, are fighting for survival.

The cult-like devotion to Avakian, should be of major concern to anyone swept up into one of the RCP's front groups, and it's a worthwhile exercise to call this out, but we at PCWC aren't interested in correcting their errors. As anarchists we're naturally opposed to their centralized leadership and promotion of the "mass line" of the Maoist organization, but this alone is not where we break with many of the Marxist, Leninist, and/or Maoist persuasion.

We believe that the radical possibilities of total liberation from authority are far more transformative and intoxicating than any steps to a revolution as prescribed by any so-called revolutionary chairman. Take their stance on Arizona as an example, one of their demands "No more troops! Demilitarize the border!", this is not only a conservative stance amongst revolutionaries, but it shows that once again the people are ahead of their revolutionary "leaders." The RCP, like many on the left, are afraid to state the obvious, that millions of people have already disregarded the legitimacy of the border line, they have to move across it every day, regardless of the law. Further more, by solely opposing the militarization of the borderlands they join in a colonial tradition that attacks the indigenous people of these occupied lands, as tribes are indeed separated by the border wall. By holding the legitimacy of the state over those of the individuals and communities struggling to preserve their ways of life, the RCP become de facto ideological enforcers of the border.

Their other slogan for their Arizona Freedom Summer is "We don't gotta show no stinkin' papers!", this slogan, if in fact reflective of their actual political stance, is similar to their call for a demilitarization of the border in that they do not call for an end to these movement controls. As anarchists, we do not hesitate to call for the complete abolition of all borders and identification papers, these are tools the authorities use to repress, genocide, and maintain power over people. We want to leave no ideological room for the defense of the state, something the RCP is unwilling to do, because in the end, like all statists, they recognize that they too will make use of the same apparatus of control. A world with out borders is a stateless world, one in which the walls of the rich and powerful have fallen, thus signaling an end to the movement of people for the extraction of the surplus value from their labor. So why is the RCP reluctant to advocate for such a vision, here and now?

As anti-capitalists and anti-authoritarians we say there is no better time than now!

We in PCWC believe in the potential of a revolution, one that can transform our day to day social affairs, as well as our relationships to power, and what that power means for all of us. The Revolutionary Communist Party, like all authoritarian left formations, offers none of these things, but more of the same: lifetimes of work, misery, and obedience (to the state, the party, the chairman, etc).


*For some interesting history on their inability to build a revolutionary communist movement, check out dissident former RCP member Mike Ely's "9 Letters to Our Comrades" a critical analysis of the failures in their mass line, the cult of Avakian, and their inability to draw any level of consistent mass participation in their Maoist outfit.

*Finally, for the second installment of our week of anti-RCP posts, I'd like to turn to an older piece written by our own Phoenix Insurgent on his old blog. Although the piece is five years old, it's a good refresher on the RCP, specifically when it comes to their long history of using front groups to manipulate and recruit.

Understanding World Can't Wait and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)by Phoenix Insurgent

The rise of the most recent RCP front group, The World Can't Wait, provides a good opportunity for me to offer some links to criticisms of the RCP, its strategies and leader, Bob Avakian. In the past, the RCP has attempted to utilize front groups like Not In Our Name and the October 22nd Organization (O22).

Its strategy is similar to that of another Stalinist sect, the Workers World Party, which for several years has operated through its front group International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism). Both groups hope to use their fronts in order to manipulate folks who honestly oppose the policies of the Bush regime and the war. In the case of World Can't Wait, the steering committee - apparently self-appointed - is stacked with RCP members, disproportionate to their numbers and influence in the anti-war movement as a whole.

People who care about the future of the anti-war and other movements are right to start looking for alternatives to the stale, boring local scene, dominated as it is by Democratic electoralism and liberal candle-holding. But World Can't Wait brings us nothing that we can't do for ourselves. And it brings several disadvantages we can ill afford.

Four things we can do instead: (1) Break out of the vigil, anti-Bush rut - let's start picking meaningful targets that get to the root of the problem; (2) Focus on militant direct action aimed at targets that have a real impact on the war and its supporters; (3) Link up and support local struggles, especially those of the poor and people of color; (4)

Ditch the political parties - our demands are clear and can be articulated and accomplished without the mediation of a third party.

For some good reading on the RCP and its history, consider the following articles:

This October 22, the RCP follows the anarchists
This short piece, from the Anarchist People of Color website, looks at some of the current changes in the RCP and why they may have made them. It also cautions anarchists and others to be skeptical of coalition work with them.

Mythology of the White-Led "Vanguard": A Critical Look at the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
This is a classic piece, though it focuses on the RCP as it was a few years ago. It's is worth reading to see where the RCP came from. Highlighted are its homophobic roots, amongst others. Though the RCP has reorganized some since this came out, most of the criticisms are still very valid. In an interview here, the author updates his criticism.

The Maoist cultism of the RCP is anti-Marxist
This is a pretty good analysis, though it comes from another authoritarian communist group. Not all of it's criticisms are valid, especially the more sectarian ones. However, the points about the cultish nature of the RCP and its pro-middle class orientation are worth reading.

These are three good places to start. In the end, though, the RCP is a deceptive, centralized and authoritarian organization. If we want to bring the war to an end and, eventually, bring about revolution in this country, we need to stick to decentralized and democratic forms of organizing because those reflect the world we want to replace the current one. And we need to keep our eyes on the real cause of the war, which goes beyond particular politicians or particular business interests. It's time to start talking about capitalism, the State, white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy and the other systems that have brought us this and every other war. To stop them, we need a new direction in Phoenix, but we don't need World Can't Wait or the RCP.

There's an old anarchist saying, "If you want to know what a communist is saying, look at his hands." That means, the rhetoric is just that - rhetoric. Forget the words, look at what they are doing if you want to know what they really mean. We need to keep an eye on the RCP and WCW.

***

For the book readers out there, check out Daniel Cohn-Bendit's "Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative" for a good treatment of communist parties as they operate in modern technological societies on the verge of revolution. Cohn-Bendit was a major player in the May Days of 1968 in Paris and had plenty to say after the communists sold the revolutionary movement out in France.

http://phoenixinsurgent.blogspot.com/

Fuck the RCP: New PCWC Poster

I suppose it was only a matter of time. What with all the movement hacks from the Left Coast making their cameo appearances here since SB1070 passed, I was a little surprised that we hadn't yet heard from one of the worst of the worst: the self-described "Revolutionary Communist Party". Naturally, no sooner had I evoked his name but the devil himself appeared.

So now the RCP's been sniffing around Phoenix, hoping to prey on well-meaning warm-blooded anarchists in order to get their necrotic vampire hands on the movement here. The dead require fresh blood to live, they say. Naturally then, PCWC was approached by a cadre looking for support for their shenanigans. Of course, we told them an unequivocal and unqualified "Hell, no!" And not just because they're an authoritarian cult! There is no way that we would work with the RCP and there's no reason that anyone who believes in human freedom and equality ought to either.

Not only that, but the RCP obviously hadn't done their research. PCWC is composed of members who cut our teeth at mass actions in LA in which the RCP revealed their sketchy manipulations and anti-anarchist skulduggery. These types always come from outside. It was in fact our experiences with the fallacy of the big leftist tent that taught us to be deeply skeptical of the authoritarian left. They talk a big game about all being in for the same thing, but the truth is anything but! Of course, looking to the history of anarchist-authoritarian communist relations only reinforces that.

No doubt the RCP will whine about how we're being divisive for calling them out and refusing them aid. But do we call the prisoner who fights her jailer "divisive"? Of course not! We won't bend to this bullshit fake logic. We are under no obligation to show them any quarter. It is the authoritarian communist, after all, who has to answer for the crimes, lies and distortions of her ideology. We, having been for so many decades on the shit end of that stick should have to offer no further explanation than that we will not continue the pattern of abuse.

Naturally, being PCWC, we will of course offer further explanation. It is our firm commitment that the left -- especially the authoritarian left -- is in fact an impediment to revolutionary struggle. After all, it's always they who swoop in at the last minute and save capitalism. Or who impose bureaucratized state capitalism. Or who sell out the wildcats. Or who imprison the militants. Or who argue for the popular front. Or who build the labor camps. None of which takes us a centimeter closer to the revolution that the RCP's creepy leader, American ex-pat Bob Avakian, claims to want in his Left Bank pontifications. On the same note, we always believed that the one good thing Arizona had going for it was no left to speak of and a strong libertarian bent amongst the right.

Since learning the true nature of these left fascist bastards, you can imagine our frustration at the massive flood of them that has followed the celebrity of SB1070. One parasitic leftist operation from out of town after another has parachuted into the Valley of the Sun and proceeded to lecture the locals on who we should be working with and why, to seek to impose their myopic, petty and narrow view of our conditions and struggle, and to generally make a nuisance of themselves, trampling over legitimate local projects and organizing in the process.

So, because of that, I'm announcing a week of anti-RCP posts here on Fires Never Extinguished. We'll have something for you pretty much every other day for this week. Essays, links, media, even a book (the poster above should fit on a 8.5" by 14" sheet of paper). Things that will help you understand what the RCP is, why it should not be welcomed here and, in the broader sense, to help you develop a critique of Leninism so that you can stand up to these revisionist creeps.

Long live anarchy!

Support the Arpaio Five!

This is a reminder that several comrades of ours still face charges stemming from the police attack on the Dine', O'odham, anarchist/anti-authoritarian contingent (DO@) at the January 16th anti-Arpaio march. If you visit the support page, you can read updates and donate money for the defense. Please consider helping out our friends in their fight against this bullshit.

Rereading the DO@ statement lately, I'm impressed with how prescient it was, as well as how the problems within the movement that were highlighted in it remain with us. Indeed, the statement was a clear, unambiguous call for a new kind of movement that recognized that the fight against white supremacy and colonialism transcended the crass and limited opposition to Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This is a point that was brought clearly home the day that SB1070 passed and the movement in general was forced to recognize the truth, even if (as usual), the people who made that point earlier have continued to be ostracized and attacked.

In addition, it critiqued the boring repetition of useless marches and predicated and called for the rise of a direct action-oriented movement, which was ridiculed at the time but has since come to pass. There is certainly a time for marches and vigils, but I think it was clear to all of us involved in organizing and writing that statement that that time had long since passed, given the situation in Arizona. As I said, that logic, though lost on the conservative movement leadership (and other non-profiteer types outside the state) and various self-appointed gatekeepers, has found fertile ground in many people these days, as we saw most recently with the lock down of the Tucson border patrol office by an affinity group of anti-authoritarian, anarchist and indigenous militants.

But, perhaps most of all, it called for a broadening of the movement, of a reconsideration of the composition of the movement and for a radically democratic and participatory movement to replace the rigid, leftist, hierarchical movement that currently holds power. We see more and more evidence of this emerging these days, whether in the student self-organized walkouts during the week SB1070 passed to the neighborhood assemblies now forming in several cities in the Valley, originally initiated by anarchists and other residents in Tempe (including PCWC), that have begun to spread, prefiguring a new way of resisting the law and racism in general that bypasses both statewide government and the movement hacks, and determines to drill down as small as it takes to get a core that can set up resistance in collective, accountable and democratic fashion.

As men and women willing to stand up and defend that vision with their bodies and their futures, the Arpaio Five deserve our support. Please visit their page and make a donation. And continue to fight for the movement we want.

Nazis patrol Pinal County, a history of the resistance so far, and the always looming question of why the Right suffers no hang up about non-violence.

Today I want to highlight three things that I see as related and I think some readers will, too. As the situation gets worse and worse here in Arizona, even as we chalk up some successes here and there, it's worth taking a moment to consider the circumstances of our revolt and ways to consider the ideas and movements that manifest around us and in which we participate.

As leftist organizers, movement hacks, non-profiteers, wannabe politicos, student dreamers and all the other assorted movement professionals pour into Arizona to celebrate their "Freedom Summer" at our expense, I find the need to reflect particularly pressing. And, believe me, I can feel these movement types pressing in from all sides these days. I wonder, do they know what they are in for? Not that ignorance would stop them from telling me what I ought to do while they're on vacation in the state I've lived in my entire life.

If I said in an earlier article that those people who move here bring their biases with them, for which we are collectively blamed, the same is true for activists from out of state. In an era of "Freedom Summer (redux)" and SDS (respawned), how could it be otherwise?

Force for liberation or recuperation? Or attack on radicals and those who have already made up their minds not to compromise? "Freedom summer" certainly begs the question. One thing for sure, those of us who live here almost certainly will be left to clean up the mess when the Fall semester comes and the boys and girls of Summer have gone back to their leftist ghettos to update their resumes.

THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT PATROLS PINAL COUNTY

Check out, for instance, the always amusing (if still sometimes wrong) Feathered Bastard column over at the Phoenix New Times, where Stephen Lemons writes about the local NSM chapter (who we confronted last year). Lemons points out perennial tubby bear Nazi JT Ready's call out to his racist comrades to conduct armed patrols in Southern Arizona for migrants.

The article is interesting for a several reasons, but one of the things I picked up on was Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu's failure to denounce the Nazi composition of the patrols. Sure, he says that he doesn't think the patrols would be helpful, but it seems as if Babeu, like the local media (with the exception of Lemons), has opted to treat Ready's little Nazi crew as legitimate, giving him a pass on his white supremacist beliefs and his many violent threats. Consider the fact the two media headlines about the event identify the NSM in the title only as a "militia", not as Nazis or even a "Nazi militia". A more honest characterization would surely change the way people view the action.

Indeed, when asked by Lemons about what he thought about the patrols, Babeu said, "Local law enforcement can't handle this on our own, yet it will only complicate our concerns to have untrained and armed citizens, who are not from Pinal County - patrolling our desert areas." Well, sure, I suppose it might. But is there anything particularly remarkable about those armed patrols being conducted by the National Socialist Movement, Babeu? Not worthy of comment? This reflects the general climate here in Arizona these days.

For me it's particularly noteworthy because I pointed out in my analysis of the anti-speed camera movement last summer the inherent problems of the leaders of main anti-camera group allying with Sheriff Babeu precisely because it opened the door to the reinforcement of white supremacy, rather than taking the opportunity to challenge it that rejecting his support (and, later, that of Sheriff Joe) would have provided. Instead, ideologically unable to articulate a strictly "no-cameras" position, they chose an argument that offered more police as a substitute for cameras, which naturally brings with it the well-known racist enforcement Arizona police are known for. This weak-kneed comment from Babeu, either because he sympathizes or because the radicalism of the fascist NSM has mainstreamed enough that he worries about challenging it, seems to go towards further proving that point.

One last point before I move on. The boldness of the NSM lately in carrying their firearms to rallies, to interviews, in displaying them to the media, in carrying them on patrols and in sporting them at counter-protests, ought to give everyone pause, not least of all any anarchists who are not currently able to defend themselves. Self-defense ought to be on everyone's mind these days. Never forget that Nazis like these aren't just the voice of white reaction against people of color and for the defense of the privileges of whiteness, they are also the sword tip of Capital's attack on those who would truly challenge the capitalist order, such as anarchists.

THE MONSOON STORM LOOMS IN ARIZONA

Next, I want to point out to readers the excellent article posted up yesterday by our comrades at Survival Solidarity out of Tucson. Just in time for the monsoons that alternately scorch and then drench Arizona day after day this time of year, they have provided for us a map of where we have been and where we may be going, at the same time they cleverly reveal the way the border imposes itself in relations far beyond those at la linea.

I like this analysis because it fits very well into the (not strictly) insurrectionist view of Capital reproducing itself everywhere at all times not just in our social relations but likewise even within the contradiction between Capital's demand for cheap, precarious labor and it's concomitant fear of the need to self-organize in defense of its every day and never-ending attacks. Of course, perhaps outside that, or at least parallel to it, lies the demand of American capitalism for a reactionary white working class that will lead the way in attacking its most exploited elements.

The piece does a really good job of making clear the violence, generally unspoken, that underlies and pervades the enforcement of these social relations and, naturally, which must at the same time be reflected in the fight to define ourselves against these illegitimate impositions. As Derek Jensen has, I think, quite usefully pointed out, violence that goes down the social hierarchy generally goes unremarked on while violence that with an upward trajectory, aimed at the exploiter, always elicits condemnation from the system and its defenders. Perhaps there's more than a little of this in the media's hysteria over the largely non-existent problem of migrant-caused violence versus the normalization afforded unmistakable violent threats to people of color represented by the NSM.

NON-VIOLENCE PROTECTS THE STATE AND THE COLONIAL MASTER

Lastly, I want to share an audio interview with Peter Gelderloos and Gord Hill. Gelderloos will be known to folks familiar with PCWC's "Beer & Revolution" social night. Traveling with the Greek anarchists, Gelderloos is perhaps best known for his book "How Non-Violence Protects the State" (PDF here) which, I'm happy to say, quotes a little pamphlet I wrote many years ago a couple times.

Hill, perhaps less familiar to people, is most recently the author of "500 Years of Indigenous Resistance, the Comic Book", in which Hill sets out to accomplish the admirable goal of demolishing the myth of the conquest of Indigenous peoples of North America: that on one hand they were felled by disease or that on the other defeated by the violence of an inherently superior settler state. In fact, he asserts, there was plenty of resistance, taking a variety of forms, and that that resistance often succeeded in dealing severe blows to the colonizer.

In the interview, with features both of them, the two do a wonderful job of breaking down the ideological underpinnings of non-violence/pacifism, in particular the class relations that infuse them. Hill takes a swipe at the non-profit industrial complex as a key element in maintaining the domination of the often a-historical assertions of the effectiveness of the strategies. It also tackles head on the tendency of the enforcers of non-violence/pacifism to act as the vanguard of state repression while claiming to be protecting the movement. This is accomplished by singling out those militants who deviate from the orthodoxy. I know we've seen this here in Arizona many times.

As the professional managers of revolt race to take their well-paid positions here in Arizona, these points are worth paying attention to. I think Gelderloos and Hill also successfully demolish some of the key mythologies that the defenders of non-violence/pacifism uphold, including exposing the false idea of the "public" as a construct of the media itself. The inherent authoritarianism of non-violence/pacifism likewise get a good working over.

WELCOMING THE CRISIS BY NAME

Overall, I think that regular readers of this blog will find the three pieces cited above to be quite complementary and well-worth your investigations. The fact is, as Survival Solidarity points out (and perhaps even the boneheads in the NSM understand), we stand today on the verge of social explosion. Perhaps we can feel the winds sucking in as the spark even now demands more and more oxygen. Or maybe that's us holding our breath in this blazing heat. It's hard to tell these days.

Who knows what's coming? The white supremacist system continues to descend into crisis, driven by the demands of its white working and middle class base for the respect of their petty privileges in an age of economic collapse. It's the bastard class politics of whiteness. We at PCWC continue organizing in our neighborhood, intervening in movements and working in close solidarity with our comrades in struggle both to defend against the attack but also to turn the crisis in another direction, one in which whiteness is not the means of capital's assault, but instead the collapse of which opens the door for a broad and much-needed house cleaning.

Still, the rising strength and boldness of the reactionary right combined with the complete and utterly predictable impotency of the liberal left give pause for careful thought. In a year that has already seen several small outbreaks of violence from the right, I would be surprised if there wasn't a violent and remarkable -- even by media standards -- explosion from them or those they inspire at some point before the summer's flame is finally extinguished. Clearly that is their goal.

I'm thinking today of a line from the song "This Gun Is Not a Gun" by the British songwriter, Chris T-T: "This cowardice is not cowardice/ We're just taking a breath before we do this."

Inhale and then into the fight!